Cult Director Gregg Araki on His New Movie with Shailene Woodley, White Bird in a Blizzard

Cast member Shailene Woodley, left, and screenwriter and director Gregg Araki pose together at the premiere of the film "White Bird in a Blizzard" during the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, on Monday, Jan. 20, 2014, in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Danny Moloshok/Invision/AP)

Funny that two movies could come out at precisely the same time and be about precisely the same unusual thing—a wife vanishes, a family is left bewildered, the world is helpless to find her—and yet feel so entirely different. But that’s exactly what’s happened this fall with Gone Girl and its indie counterpart White Bird in a Blizzard, out today. From cult director Gregg Araki, the movie focuses on the life of Kat Connors, played by**Shailene Woodley,** after her mother, played by Eva Green, disappears. “It’s such a weird coincidence—our trailers dropped the same week,” Araki says. “I was flattered and shocked though, because that’s, like, a $60 million David Fincher studio movie, and our little indie movie was being compared to it.” In fact, the difference between the two films is a perfect encapsulation of the gap that exists between traditional Hollywood and the niche that Araki has carved out for himself since he started making films in the late eighties: If _Gone Gir_l is all bombast and big surprises, White Bird is a quiet drama that’s as moody and mottled as the brooding soundtrack of shoegaze, Siouxsie Sioux, and Depeche Mode that scores it.

If there was far less drama that met White Bird than in its controversial counterpart, there was still some, mostly concerning the prospect of a nude scene that Woodley has in the film. “It was ridiculous to me. Her sex scenes were really honest and really true—it’s not Nymphomaniac,” Araki says. “They’re very discreet and very tasteful—just beautiful moments. And it goes to speak for American puritanism. Compared to some of my other movies, it’s nothing.” Araki’s famous teenage trilogy from the nineties that focused on the nihilistic lives of a cast of L.A. kids, and even his critically acclaimed 2004 hit Mysterious Skin, about a young male prostitute, are notably more extreme than White Bird, which might push some buttons, but does so always quietly. Does that mean Araki has grown up since the crazy movies of his younger years? “Now that I’m old, I made a mature movie,” he says. “It’s almost the opposite of the teen movies I made back in the nineties—those kids had no parents, had no house. It was reckless teenage chaos. I just couldn’t have made White Bird 20 years ago.”

Asked if he’s ever surprised about the cult status his older movies have received in the spate of nineties nostalgia that seems to be everywhere these days, he’s characteristically humble. “Kids come up to me and say, The Doom Generation changed my life. And I’m like, you weren’t even born! The way people consume movies is changing, Netflix, Amazon—now movies have a whole life of their own. You make this thing, put it out there, and hope somebody sees it, so as an artist it’s the highest compliment that you can be paid: that something you did changed someone’s life.” Besides, Araki just does what he does, no matter who’s watching. “My movies have always been about outsiders, I’m just not interested in things that are middle of the road, or mainstream. I’ve always been interested in punk rock music, alternative culture—anything that’s not in the middle,” he says. “And I guess that’s why people like me.”